I have been teaching the half marathon clinic and training for a half marathon and a marathon this summer, well sort of training for a marathon and I had this big goal in the back of my mind as well. I was not sure how to train for this big goal and then I saw that Run Like a Mother was having a Dopey training plan. I thought about it and thought about it and finally decided to look into it. It turned out it was a heart rate based training plan and I was not sure if I wanted to do this kind of plan. I have had a love hate relationship with heart rate training over the last three years. I had my zones tested in 2013 and started with a heart rate training plan and gave up because I was running so S L O W. I gave up after a few weeks and returned to my pace based training and did my Ironman training with my coach. The thing about training for an Ironman is you do a lot of long slow workouts and I knew I was getting better but not faster.
Post Ironman I had my zones tested again to make sure I was training in the right zones based on pace and was surprised to see my new zone 1 was my old zone 3, I had improved my endurance base. The flip side was I had no speed and my zone 2 and 3 were small and I could not even get a reading for zone 4. I started adding some speed work and strength training and saw some results including my 2:02:28 half marathon in May, a PB by over 6 mins.
I know that if you keep doing the same thing over and over, you will get the same results and I wanted different results, not sure what they are but I know I wanted something different so I bought the program. When I saw the program I was in shock..where is the rest of the training, 2.5 hours in the first week...WTF??? Also the heart rate zones where low, my zone 1 was 137-157 and we had a 130 and 140 bpm runs...yikes. It was week 2 of the training program and I can't say I fully committed to it, I could not unprogram my past training and believe that this would work for me. What is this I thought, I am use to doing 10+ hour training weeks, this won't work. I started to listen to the podcasts that go with the training program and read the weekly newsletters and it made sense. Coach MK is a straight talking, no bull, fast talking ball of awesome and she draws you in, Dimity is the voice of reason to me, I have followed the AMR podcasts for years and she balances MK's whirlwind, word salad approach.
The first thing I did was defer the Wineglass marathon, it does not work with my Disney goal and I was not running enough distance but I am running the Army Run half (hopefully for a new PB) and Spacecoast marathon (as a training run) but my focus is heart-rate and Disney for now. I look forward to this training cycle, I am willing to buy in totally now and see where it takes me and as long as it takes me to Disney it's a win. Next year I WILL run the Wineglass marathon and I am hoping I can have Coach MK can help me with that and together we will decide on my goal...I might just surprise myself :-)
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